My journey to Christ has been marked by learning to give my ALL to him and to daily surrender to his lordship.
All of my life I grew up in a Bible-believing Christian home. I went to youth group, attended church every Sunday and was known as a “good, innocent kid” in high school because I didn’t swear or drink or party. My conviction to follow these sorts of uncommon patterns came from my faith, but a lot of it was not strong, Christ-loving conviction. Rather, it was just the things I felt that Christians did.

Around December of my 8th grade year, I knew that I believed the story of the gospel and I wanted to turn that into salvation. So, I asked my youth pastor how that worked he prayed with me and I told God I wanted to be his son – that I accepted his eternal gift of life. At that time, I made a formal commitment to follow Christ. And in some ways, I did! But in many others, I was still stuck in sin. I constantly compared myself to others, sometimes even wanting to be a “good” Christian (as in – I felt that I could out of my own strength be good at following Christ and impress people with that.) This caused me to be so ashamed of my sin that I wouldn’t talk about it with anyone. In a continual downward spiral, I gave Satan more and more control of my life as he oppressed me with shame and guilt.

Finally, when I came to college my faith turned from mainly being a set of rules to being a following. I learned to share my sins with others and experienced great freedom from shame and guilt in Christian community. This is not to say that I wasn’t a Christian before college, I just really started listening to him and trusting him more since coming to UW. It’s also not to say that I no longer struggle with sin, simply that sin I once enjoyed has now become something I hate and fight daily to cast out of my life.

God has taught me to joyfully submit to him every day, and he continues to bring issues and idols in my life to light so that I can surrender them and enjoy them more fully. One recent example of this is my sarcastic joking patterns. I love sarcasm and the humor behind it but lately, God has convicted me of the sin that I sometimes fall into in pursuing a cheap laugh. God has called me to surrender that to him to find all of my identity in him. In doing so, I have experienced his love more and been able to share it with others more and more. I’m not saying I no longer sin in this area, but that God is continuing to reshape my heart to want what He wants and interact with people in a way that reflects Him.

God really just asks us for one thing – complete trust in Him and the gospel. That is that we are sinners and the only way to reconcile our relationship with God is through Jesus’ death on the cross. As I have continued to do this more and more, I have seen God’s grace and love pouring through my life.